In wireless data transmission/reception scenarios, such as those that are compliant with the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) Standard 802.16-2004, IEEE Standard 802.16e-2005, and IEEE 802.16 Cor2/D4-2007 specifications, a so-called sliding-window decoding architecture is commonly used as a hardware implementation option. The sliding-window architecture provides for efficient calculation complexities and reduces hardware requirements with minor performance degradation relative to that of other decoding architectures. However, such minor performance degradation is not guaranteed in situations where shorter or smaller-sized packets are received and decoded. For example, in the IEEE 802.16d/e specification, packets can be sized down to 6 bytes. Using the sliding-window decoding approach in the presence of shorter or smaller packets can lead to undesirable decoding performance and inefficiencies.